Akiko fumed as she packed up her things to go to the main building on the chief’s orders to call every hotel in Tokyo. She guzzled two more espressos and stormed off. She could handle anything, but it meant she wouldn’t be handling everything that would produce results.
After she was gone, the office felt quiet, and not in a good way.
Hiroshi texted Masaharu Watanabe at the National Tax Agency. After Hiroshi’s uncle introduced them during a murder embezzlement case, they met for drinks, each delighted to find someone to talk shop with. Watanabe focused on tax evasion from big corporations and the ultra-wealthy, while Hiroshi zeroed in on investment scams, real estate rip-offs, and pension thefts. Watanabe could see him in a couple of hours.
Hiroshi called the lawyer and the judge handling the divorce case Miyuki filed. They would know more about their marriage and finances than was apparent from the little information they had so far. But lawyers and judges were great at evasion too, better than most criminals. The judge’s secretary promised to squeeze him in before noon, and the lawyer reserved early afternoon to meet with them and Miyuki.
Maybe the wife, Miyuki, would be forthcoming on the where, when, and how of her husband’s work. If she wanted to divorce him and keep the money, she’d have to know most of it. Or maybe she was covering up for him, the divorce a financial scam of some sort.
Hiroshi reviewed what he had, which wasn’t much. Murder was almost always connected to money, but the homicide division always started with more on the murder than on the money. Hiroshi wished he had a money crew as professional as the crime scene crew.
On the money side, there wasn’t an actual scene to work over. It was forensic, but account information, transfer forms, balances, and numerical abstractions were harder to grasp than physical evidence.
Hiroshi sat down at his monitors and searched online for Nine Dragons. The website came up right away, but before he could navigate to any concrete information, an ancient map of Asia rolled over the screen. He searched for a “skip video” button but couldn’t find one. Chinese triple-sail junks arose from the waters of ancient maps and sailed across the waves from the coastline of China past Vietnam into the South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java and Flores Seas, and finally to the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean.
Gradually, the old boats morphed into modern ocean-going yachts and docked at harbors. Airplanes took off from major cities, evolving from turboprops to jets, spreading out in all directions with stops in Panama and the Caribbean. Japan figured prominently. Behind this imagined history of global capital, dragons, threatening but protective, writhed and darted, pausing only to stare out with fierce eyes and sharp claws before zipping into the clouds.
When the graphics finished, an image of the Nine Dragons offices appeared. Hard-working, good-looking employees discussed spreadsheets in friendly groups. The numbers whirled by, arrows zigzagged up, dipped down, and headed back up. Rows and columns of numbers faded in and out before turning into dragons—wealth as a primal force of nature, as fluid as ocean currents, as invisible as the wind.
When the video finished, the screen said, “Contact us” with an email and phone number, and nothing else.
He clicked off and went to the police database of articles. In the investing and financial section, he found few articles other than an announcement of registering in Japan and a couple short puff pieces. They didn’t do interviews, didn’t do press releases, or if they did, he couldn’t find them.
Even if they grabbed the husband at a port of entry and interrogated him, they still had the problem of digging deeper into Nine Dragons. The CEO of an investment firm didn’t get beaten to death in his office because the accounts were all in order.
He called Akiko to see if she could shake free and help him find more information, her specialty.
“Do you know how many hotels there are in Tokyo?” Akiko yelled in English, so whoever was in the room with her wouldn’t understand.
Hiroshi had rarely heard her so impatient. “I can only imagine.”
“Would you stay at a hotel if you’d abducted your own daughters?”
“Why don’t you ask the chief to at least let you work from here?”
“We skipped the love hotels, minshuku, and ryokan. Many of those don’t ask for identification.”
“The love hotels especially.”
“So, we focused on the mid- and large-size Western-style hotels. Even those number in the thousands. They all claim to record every guest, but they all do it in a different way. One place has robot check-in, and they weren’t sure how to retrieve the information from the robot database.”
“Did you check four-star hotels?”
“We saved those for the afternoon. At this rate, I’ll be up all night.”
“And if they stay on the move, we’ll always be a step behind.” Hiroshi started looking through the sticky notes on the back of his monitors.
“If he even went to a hotel. If he’s even in Japan.”
“Do you know Detective Ishii?”
“Of course. All the women in the homicide division know one another. Basic self-defense.”
“Women never have a hierarchy.”
“We’re all equal in the women’s room. Gossip central.” Akiko laughed. “Again, self-defense. Did you see the notes about the investment scam I left on the back of your monitors?”
Hiroshi flipped through them. “Maybe someone will report the missing girls with their father.”
“Did they find a lot of cash hidden in the apartment?”
“I didn’t think of that. Who would the girls go with willingly?”
“Their mother, the babysitter, or their grandmother. Or their father, if he was back. They might not feel it strange that he came in the middle of the night, but he’d have to tell them some kind of story.”
“And if it was the father, where would he go?”
“Not to a hotel where he had to register with ID. To a friend’s. That’s why calling the hotels is a waste.”
Sakaguchi knocked on the doorjamb, his huge body filling the frame.
Hiroshi looked up, pleased to see him. He told Akiko, “I’ve got to go. Sakaguchi’s here.”
“Tell him to get me off this hotel thing.”
“I will.” Hiroshi rolled out his computer chair for Sakaguchi. It was easier to slip into and get out of with his knee bothering him.
Sakaguchi grunted as he sat down. “We got something from the surveillance camera outside the building.” Sakaguchi pointed at Akiko’s computer. “I just sent it.”
“I’ll tell her if you ever get her back here. What did you find?”
“Three hundred license plates. Nothing from the parking lot. No other images of anyone, masked or unmasked.”
“Nothing then. Can you get Akiko back over here? I need her.”
Sakaguchi sighed. “I’ll try the chief again later.”
“Anything else?”
“They put the babysitter in an induced coma so hold off on that until they call us. What did you find about Nine Dragons?”
“Not much other than a slick video and a contact form. Wealth protection firms don’t share much online. You want to see it?”
“After I have some wealth to protect.”
“I’m heading out to talk with Watanabe about any tax violations and then the judge and the divorce lawyer.”
“Maybe the babysitter will come to and tell us everything we need to know.”
“I think we need to find out why Nine Dragons came to Tokyo, and what Patrick was doing for them in Wyoming.”
“Couldn’t they work from wherever they were, Shanghai or wherever, just as easily?” Sakaguchi asked.
“I would have thought so. So there must be other reasons to come here.”
“New client base?”
“It doesn’t seem like Tokyo rent is worth it. That space must be outrageous. They could do all this from Hong Kong, Singapore, or Shanghai, and they handle wealth management services in English, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Bahasa Malaysian.”
“Check into their other customers.”
“I’m waiting on client information from Mehta, the office manager.”
“Speed him up a bit.”
“I’ll wait until Takamatsu gets here to do that. I worry the Chinese Embassy will get in ahead of us.”
Sakaguchi shook his head. “The chief always wants to talk with those bigwigs, and he always kowtows to them, but he’s too indecisive to ever say OK. So, we might have a little time.”
“If we can get in there before the embassy does, or some other agency—”
“The tax office guy Watanabe won’t tip off other ministries, will he?” Sakaguchi lifted his thick leg with two hands, wincing.
“No, he won’t, but they find out things anyway. Another reason to send Akiko back here. I need her.”
Sakaguchi pushed himself up from the chair. “When the chief gets an idea, he has to torture everyone with it. The file Akiko pulled up showed ninety thousand hotels in Japan. More than half of those in Tokyo.”
“What about car rental agencies? He’s got to move the girls somehow.”
Sakaguchi rolled his head around, stretching his neck and shoulders. “We might get lucky there.”
Hiroshi sighed. “Add in limousine services, private taxis, and the car agency is as hopeless as the hotel route. Akiko said the hotels will take days.”
“And by then they’ll be gone. The chief wants to showcase this as a feel-good rescue story, one to boost relations with the Chinese Embassy and the ministries. Which are my next meetings.” Sakaguchi put his hands on the doorjamb and leaned back on his leg to stretch his knee. Then he stood up straight, breathing deeply. “The first twenty-four hours are crucial with these kinds of cases. And a quarter of those are already gone.”